White horses 1925

Nicholas Roerich’s painting, White Horses, is a world of purples and blues, mountains and figures. I can feel him making this work, building it up, probably starting with thin washes of colour. The white horses are a flurry of movement across the blue ground of the mountain. Roerich has confidently painted over these muted tones with thicker layers of white. Look at the dynamism of the clouds above, how they mirror the running horses. I wonder if he was thinking about the great cloudscapes of John Constable or Turner? I can imagine him taking the colours from the landscape, mixing them on his palette, and then allowing them to blend and merge on the canvas to make this scene. Artists are always stealing from each other, riffing on themes, responding to earlier works, and creating something new in the process. Painting is like a never-ending conversation!